Blue Caprice

Blue Caprice

Blue Caprice

This looks great, because several titles that we've highlighted on S&A will be making their New York premieres. It's great (for me), because I'll finally get to see them, and write about them.

Notables include Blue Caprice, Rengaine, A Hijacking, and Burn It Up Djassa.

As usual, I'll return with any individual profiles of films we haven't already profiled. In the meantime, here's the full lineup via press release from The Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The 42nd Annual New Directors/New Films will take place from March 20–31.

Tickets go on sale to the general public at Noon on Sunday, March 10, 2013.
New Directors/New Films tickets can be purchased online atnewdirectors.org, or in person at the box offices of the Film Society of Lincoln Center (Walter Reade Theater, 165 W. 65th Street, north side/upper level, and Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th Street, south side, both between Broadway and Amsterdam) and The Museum of Modern Art (Film Desk and Information Desk, 11 W. 53rd Street, between Fifth & Sixth Avenues).

There are two advance ticketing opportunities:
Film Society and MoMA Members may purchase tickets starting at Noon on Sunday, March 3. To become a Member of the Film Society or MoMA please visit:filmlinc.comand MoMA.org, respectively.

The 42nd New Directors/New Films features selections include:

OPENING NIGHT SELECTIONBLUE CAPRICE(2012) 92min
Director: Alexandre Moors
Country: USA
Alexandre Moors’s remarkable debut feature explores the impulse to commit murder, following two snipers, the elder John and 17-year old Lee, who orchestrate an insidious act of gun violence that is seemingly torn from the front pages. Abandoned by his mother, Lee is taken in by John, who becomes a mentor preaching hate and teaching marksmanship. Blind loyalty grows, and death becomes mundane. Masterfully performed by Isaiah Washington and Tequan Richmond, the characters are disturbingly human. Moors and screenwriter R.F.I. Porto navigate the violence discreetly, focusing on the inner origins of evil. An essential film for our times.

CLOSING NIGHT SELECTIONOUR NIXON(2013) 85min
Director: Penny Lane
Country: USA
As President Richard Nixon tape-recorded his conversations for posterity, so his devoted aides—H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Dwight Chapin—shot hundreds of rolls of Super-8 film documenting the presidency. Filmmakers Penny Lane (DIR/Co-SCR/Co-PROD) and Brian L. Frye (Co-SCR/Co-PROD) have edited this footage—virtually unseen since the FBI seized it during the Watergate investigation—and interwoven it with period news footage and pop culture, excerpts from the Nixon tapes, and contemporary interviews. OUR NIXON offers an unprecedented, insider’s view of an American presidency, chronicling watershed events including the Apollo moon landing and the path-breaking trip to China, as well as more intimate glimpses of Nixon in times of glory and disgrace.

THE ACT OF KILLING(2012) 116min – theatrical cut, 158min – director’s cut
Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Country: Denmark
What is one to make of the men who freely admit their involvement—and pleasure—in the mass killing of millions of Indonesians during that country’s bloody anti-Communist campaign in the 1960s? American filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer’s THE ACT OF KILLING bypasses the usual documentary tropes of exposing injustice, instead provoking the viewer to consider the murderers’ sense of responsibility for their crimes. Teetering between sheer horror and grotesque comedy, this is a glimpse into the heart of darkness that’s rarely been achieved in cinema. Both the theatrical version and the longer, director’s cut of the film will be screened at ND/NF. A Drafthouse Films release.

ANTON’S RIGHT HERE(Anton tut ryadom)(2012) 120min
Director: Lyubov Arkus
Country: Russia
Critic-turned-filmmaker Lyubov Arkus finds herself becoming the key caregiver for severely autistic teen Anton Kharitonov and documents over six years, in a reflective and fascinating style, the tremendous obstacles and problems of encouraging and supporting a sensitive but barely communicative boy. What sets Arkus’s work apart from so many other documentaries addressing autism is her majestically artful filmmaking (with a huge contribution by cinematographer Alisher Khamidkhodzhaev), her exceptionally close relationship to her subject, and her powerful voice-over commentary, one of the most sublime to be heard in recent cinema.

BURN IT UP DJASSA(Le djassa a pris feu)(2012) 70min
Director: Lonesome Solo
Countries: Ivory Coast/France
Brimming with the fateful energy of the ghetto, this cinema-vérité-shot, noir-tinged drama was shot in 11 days and created collectively by its streetwise protagonists eager to give voice to their present situation. Tony (Abdoul Karim Konate) is stuck in a rut and desperate to get out of the ghetto; the cocky youth hangs out gambling and hawking cigarettes until bad luck pushes him into an irrevocable dead-end situation. Narrated by a storyteller in Nouchi slang and set to slam poetry this vibrant snap-shot will have you cheering for cosmic justice.

LES COQUILLETTES(2012) 75min
Director: Sophie Letourneur
Country: France
Girls gone wild! Filmmaker Sophie brings her film and friends Carole and Camille to the Locarno Film Festival. The festival is a merry-go-round of parties, and these girls are boy crazy—when Sophie’s not stalking Louis Garrel, ineffectual attempts to hook up with unimpressed guys and emotional meltdowns ensue. Sophie Letourneur’s comedy of arrested development is a delightfully giddy, screwball lark, a self-mocking, thirty-something French counterpart to Lena Dunham’sGirls. Are Letourneur, Camille Genaud, and Carole Le Page playing themselves? Espérons que non!

THE COLOR OF THE CHAMELEON(Tsvetat na hameleona)(2012) 114min
Director: Emil Christov
Country: Bulgaria
Unfolding in the years before and after the fall of Communism, this black comedy
about a rogue secret police informant goes down a rabbit hole into a realm of twisted absurdity. The scenario by Vladislav Todorov, adapting his 2010 novelZincograph, centers on young misfit Batko Stamenov, who’s recruited to infiltrate…a book club. After being dropped for his strange ideas, Batko embarks on his own private investigation and targets the intellectuals of the “Club for New Thinking,” hatching a scheme that fully exposes the ludicrous reality of secret policing. With its first film at ND/NF in thirty-five years, Bulgaria is back!

DIE WELT(2012) 80min
Director: Alex Pitstra
Country: Netherlands
In his smart debut feature, director Alex Pitstra announces himself as a neo-Tarantino, employing an arsenal of cinematic techniques to explore a life he imagines he could have lived. The director sets his story in post–Jasmine Revolution Tunisia, where young Abdallah (Abdelhamid Naouara), Pitstra’s stand-in and a Tarantino-esque, head-strong twenty-something, dreams of leaving the video store where he works for Europe. Based loosely on his father’s story of coming to Holland, Pitstra's semi-autobiographical voyage is set against the backdrop of a contemporary yet traditional Tunisia trying to find a way forward.

EMPEROR VISITS THE HELL(Tang huang You Di Fu)(2013) 71min
Directors: Li Luo
Countries: China/Canada
Winner of the Dragons & Tigers Award for Young Cinema at the Vancouver Film Festival, Li’s crafty reworking of part of the 16th-century Chinese novelJourney to the Westis one of the most inspired recent works from an independent Chinese filmmaker. Emperor Li Shimin is now a bureaucratic boss in a big city, where the crooked Dragon King’s attempt to change the weather has backfired and condemned him to death. Li pulls the rug out from under everyone, from the audience to those whose power has gone to their heads.

A HIJACKING(Kapringen)(2012) 99min
Director: Tobias Lindholm
Country: Denmark
On its way to harbor, cargo ship MV Rozen is seized by pirates in the Indian Ocean. Moving between claustrophobic life on the ship and negotiations by the freight company in Denmark, Lindholm creates a climate of unbearable tension with an unexpected climax. The narrative is based on a true event, and his use of actual locations and people who have been in similar situations create palpable authenticity. Augmented by a terrific cast, Lindholm explores the danger of the disparity between impoverished nations and the developed world. A Magnolia Films release.JARDS(2012) 93min
Director: Eryk Rocha
Country: Brazil
The celebrated composer and musician Jards Macalé is in the recording studio where director Eryk Rocha captures him in a wide variety of poses and states of creating, imaginatively varying style and shooting formats. Fashioning an intimately attuned portrait of an artist, Rocha uses his camera as an instrument to riff with Jards in a poetic exchange between images and music. The repetitive, time-stopping process of rehearsal and the flow of energy between the two art forms create an elegiac vision of the creativity of some of Brazil’s most beloved singers and musicians.

JISEUL(2012) 109min
Director: O Muel
Country: South Korea
As part of a brutal anticommunist purge of the island of Jiju in 1948, Korean troops hunt down the inhabitants of a village caught in the crossfire. The villagers hide out in a mountain cavern, enduring an extended ordeal of cold and hunger, 120 souls crammed together below ground like the potatoes alluded to in the film’s title. Recounting a forgotten chapter in postwar Korean history, Jiju native O Muel draws out amazing performances from his nonprofessional cast, in an austere, beautifully composed, and deliberately paced requiem.

KÜF(2012) 94min
Director: Ali Aydin
Countries: Turkey/Germany
A railroad inspector spends his days in the gorgeous Anatolian outback looking for cracks on the line and his evenings writing letters to the government looking for news about his son who disappeared 18 years ago. Basri (Ercan Kesal) fights bureaucracy and secrecy in the person of police inspector Murat (Muhammet Uzuner) and the spellbinding character study, with shades of Raskolnikov, is completed by a third man, Cemil, whose anti-social behavior begs confrontation. As tension mounts Aydin shows his considerable talent bringing this poignant tale to its heartbreaking finale. Winner of the Lion of the Future Award at the Venice Film Festival 2012.

LEONES(2012) 80min
Director: Jazmin Lopez
Countries: Argentina/France/Netherlands
Is this a story about five friends wandering through a forest, or is it about a forest that receives five visitors? In this metaphysical trance film, the verdant environment is as much a character as the youngsters, enfolding them as they move through it, their playful banter, word games, and ruminations filling the air. In a succession of long takes, a gliding camera follows this enigmatic hike to nowhere. Nothing is what it seems, but a malfunctioning tape recording may contain an explanation.

L’INTERVALLO(2012) 86min
Director: Leonardo Di Costanzo
Country: Italy
Winner of the Critics’ Prize at the 2012 Venice Film Festival, this portrait of two adolescents thrown together under the eye of the Neapolitan Camorra has an air of menace and sexual tension. A shy ice-cream vendor (Alessio Gallo) guards a feisty girl (Francesca Riso) who has allegedly wronged a local gangster. Holed up in an abandoned building, they warily share dreams of escaping their fate. Director Di Costanzo brings documentary realism and a poetic eye to this quietly intense drama; his nonprofessional actors give beautifully shaded performances in Neapolitan dialect.

PEOPLE’S PARK(2012) 78min
Directors: Libbie D. Cohn & J.P. Sniadecki
Country: USA/China
An immersive, inquisitive visit to the People’s Park in Chengdu, China, this film was created in a single virtuoso tracking shot. The joys of communal play, exercise, and leisure time come under intense scrutiny from the relentless gaze of the directors' lens, creating alternate states of unease and exhilaration.

RENGAINE(2012) 75min
Director: Rachid Djaïdani
Country: France
The French title of this no-budget urban drama translates as “refrain,” and repetition is what it embodies—in this case the well-worn story ofRomeo and Juliet. Sabrina (Sabrina Hamida) accepts the marriage proposal of struggling actor Dorcy (Stéphane Soo Mongo), but Dorcy is a black Christian and Sabrina a Muslim Arab. Her eldest brother, Slimane (Slimane Dazi), enlists the 39 “brothers” in their extended clan to prevent the taboo union. Shot in the streets, this film is part love letter to the irresistible energy of Paris, part call for interracial tolerance.

THE SHINE OF DAY (Der Glanz des Tages)(2012) 90min
Directors: Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel
Country: Austria
Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel have amply demonstrated, with their previous semi-fictional, semi-documentary films, a generous perspective on people struggling at the fringes of showbiz—namely, the circus. In their latest film, vagabond performer Walter Saabel embraces what he calls “Der Glanz des Tages” (the shine of day) as a personal North Star. His nephew, the great theater actor Philipp Hochmair, finds Walter arriving at his Hamburg home unannounced, and the two begin a fascinating, testy, and wholly unpredictable relationship.

SOLDATE JEANNETTE(2012) 79min
Director: Daniel Hoesl
Country: Austria
Fanni buys clothes from an upscale boutique and lives in a beautifully appointed apartment. But something—well, everything—seems askew in her world, and she leaves town when her games with commerce are discovered. Hiking through the mountains, she encounters Anna, a young woman who has spent her life on a pig farm. Their worlds could collide—or they could help each other find brave new ones. In his first feature, director Daniel Hoesl fashions an absurdist morality play that pits an urban, manufactured world against nature.

STORIES WE TELL(2012) 108min
Director: Sarah Polley
Country: Canada
What is real? What is true? What do we remember, and how do we remember it? Actor/director Sarah Polley turns from fiction to nonfiction, in the process cracking open family secrets. Using home movies, still photographs, and interviews, Polley delves into the life of her mother, a creative yet secretive woman. But while she is talking to her own relatives, Polley’s interest lies in the bigger picture of what families hold onto as truth. STORIES WE TELL is a delicately crafted personal essay about memory, loss, and understanding. A Roadside Attractions release.

THEY’LL COME BACK(2012) 105min
Director: Marcelo Lordello
Country: Brazil
In this gentle, understated drama, an upper-middle-class 12-year-old learns how Brazil’s other half lives when she and her sullen older brother are left behind by their parents in a rural backwater. Soon, Cris (ably played by Maria Luiza Tavares, who carries the film from beginning to end) is taken in by a family living in a squatter farming community, where she waits for mom and pop to return. And waits and waits. Another fine debut from the Recife film scene, source of last year’s ND/NF hit NEIGHBORING SOUNDS.

TOWER(2012) 78min
Director: Kazik Radwanski
Country: Canada
For his feature debut, Kazik Radwanski has opted to train his camera with great intensity and control on a character who utterly lacks a center or direction, even an identity. In his mid-thirties yet still living at home with his parents, Derek (Derek Bogart) struggles to make a small animation about a green creature building rock towers. He can’t maintain any real friendships, let alone romantic involvements, until he encounters Nicole (Nicole Fairbaim), who offers a glint of promise. Radwanski‘s single-minded vision suggests filmmaking of uncommon discipline combined with unmistakable empathy.

TOWHEADS(2013) 86min
Director: Shannon Plumb
Country: USA
The Brooklyn mother of two boys and the wife of a harried theater director, Penelope barely has time to stay sane, much less create art. She finds comic relief from domestic drudgery by inhabiting the world in guises—drag king, pole dancer, Santa Claus—managing to find moments of grace even on thankless days. Accomplished video and performance artist Shannon Plumb makes a wincingly funny feature debut that strikes awfully close to home. The writer-director stars opposite her real-life husband (Derek Cianfrance, director of BLUE VALENTINE) and her talented, towheaded sons (Cody and Walker Cianfrance).

UPSTREAM COLOR(2012) 96min
Director: Shane Carruth
Country: USA
Ever since his 2004 debut, filmmaker Shane Carruth has prompted curiosity over what he’d come up with next. UPSTREAM COLOR meets expectations but is also starkly different and markedly advanced. It represents something new in American cinema, exploring life’s surprising jumps and science’s strange effects. A love story embedded in a kidnap plot, UPSTREAM COLOR leaps with great audacity through its sequences, a cinematic simulacrum of the way we reflect on our lives, astonished at, as in the title of Grace Paley’s fiction collection, ourEnormous Changes at the Last Minute. UPSTREAM COLOR opens in NY on April 5.

VIOLA(2013) 63min
Directors: Matías Piñeiro
Country: Argentina
Matías Piñeiro is one of contemporary Argentine cinema’s most sensuous and sophisticated new voices. In his latest film, VIOLA, he ingeniously fashions out of Shakepeare’sTwelfth Nighta seductive roundelay among young actors and lovers in present-day Buenos Aires. Mixing melodrama with sentimental comedy, philosophical conundrum with matters of the heart, VIOLA bears all the signature traits of a Piñeiro film: serpentine camera movements and slippages of language, an elliptical narrative and a playful confusion of reality and artifice. A Cinema Guild release.

The 42nd New Directors/New Films shorts selections include:

PROGRAM 1(In alphabetical order) 86min

EVERYTHING NEAR BECOMES FAR(2012) 11min
Director: Mauricio Arango
Countries: USA/Colombia
The peaceful daily rhythm of a farmer is violently interrupted in the heart of the breathtakingly beautiful Andean mountains.

SOUTHWEST(2013) 18min
Director: Jordi Wijnalda
Countries: USA/Turkey
In southwest Turkey, a Dutch woman helps save the lives of illegal immigrants but is forced to confront the unattended needs of those who love her.

STAMPEDE(2012) 20min
Director: Cyril Amon Schäublin
Country: Croatia
A masterful short that articulates the moment when a city and its crowds create chaos and claustrophobia.

WHAT CAN I WISH YOU BEFORE THE FIGHT? (Que puis-je te souhaiter avant le combat?)(2012) 16min
Director: Sofia Babluani
Country: France
An emotionally compelling story about a case of mistaken identity and communication that transcends barriers.

WONDERLAND(2012) 21min
Director: Peter Kerek
Country: Romania
As a mother seeks to improve life for her family, her son explores the cavernous rooms of a stranger’s house—perhaps costing the two of them a better future.

PROGRAM 2 (In alphabetical order) 84min

ARARAT(2012) 26min
Director: Engin Kundag
Country: Germany
A man tries to keep the peace in his brother’s home after a ten-year absence.

THE PIRATE OF LOVE(2012) 10min
Director: Sara Gunnarsdóttir
Countries: Iceland/USA
In Reykjavik, legends surround a CD of popular love songs, supposedly written by a lovelorn trucker in Canada.

SEQUIN RAZE(2013) 20min
Director: Sarah Gertrude Shapiro
Country: USA
A reality-show contestant tries to protect herself from the psychological onslaught of one of the producers.

TABOULÉ(2012) 4min
Director: Richard Garcia
Country: Spain
How can you measure trust? A story about secret codes.

TAKE A DEEP BREATH(Derin Nefes Al)(2012) 8min
Director: Basak Buyukcelen
Country: Turkey
When a teenager’s parents take her to see a gynecologist, her life takes an unexpected turn.

PROGRAM 3 (In alphabetical order) 88min

CHIRALIA(2013) 26min
Director: Santiago Gil
Country: Germany
A boy’s disappearance at a wooded lake leads to a questioning of memory and perception.

TO PUT TOGETHER A HELICOPTER(Para armar un helicóptero)(2012) 37min
Director: Izabel Acevedo
Country: Mexico
When summer rains bring power outages to his neighborhood, 17-year-old Oliverio comes up with an ingenious solution.

THE VILLAGE(A Cidade) (2012) 25min
Director: Liliana Sulzbach
Country: Brazil
A small village’s inhabitants are all elderly, and no one new is moving in.

ADDITIONAL SHORT FILMS

OUVERTURE(2013) 5min
Directors: Bracey Smith & Neil Dvorak
Country: USA
This animated film poetically portrays the musicality of life, loss, and family relationships. (Screens before THE SHINE OF DAY)

RP31(2012) 4:48min
Director: Lucy Raven
Country: USA
Hollywood’s Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers (SMPTE) develops image standards that can be used to test the quality of a film projection. Noted artist Lucy Raven riffs on this in RP31, her new animation composed from 31 film projection test patterns and calibration charts.(Screens before UPSTREAM COLOR)

THE SEARCH FOR INSPIRATION GONE(2012) 9min
Director: Ashley Michael Briggs
Country: UK
Combining animation, special effects, and live action, this silent film asks: will a writer who searches for inspiration find it in help or hindrance?(Screens before VIOLA)